Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I’m inclined to say, based on my experience with individualist rhetoric, that liberals are not so much “the moderate wing of fascism” as they are simply “fascism in denial” or “fascism with diplomatic characteristics.” They spend a great deal of time and effort convincing themselves and each other that they are in favor of people getting to live the lives they want to live, which is the surface level diplomatic part, but underneath that is a very controlling rhetoric and framework that subtly steers people toward blaming themselves for everything that happens in their life. Whereas the “conservative” or “reactionary” (in the western sense is what I’m most familiar with, term may not be exact same meaning elsewhere) is very blatant and crude about telling people that the world owes them nothing and they that need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the liberal finds this icky but nevertheless has internalized the actual beliefs behind it, so they preach pretty much the same thing, but with nicer language.
Instead of the conservative who says “it’s your fault”, the liberal says “it’s your mindset.” Instead of the conservative who says “you’re owed nothing,” the liberal says “we all have to work for what we want.”
At first glance, it sounds more innocent, friendly, and possibly even empowering, but what they share is a disinterest in challenging the status quo and a strong belief that if you don’t sync up the status quo, it is their duty to fix that. They will “encourage” you right up to the point that you actually want to get forceful about changing the world, at which point they fall back on their rhetoric of diplomacy and pacifism. They fear force and being seen as someone who is forceful, which they associate with immorality, but they nevertheless act in its name all the time.
Its self-crypto-fascism. I’ve been saying it for a while. “there is no such thing as a liberal” it is an non-ideology of political illiteracy. It is the political equivalent of flat-earth. You have to ignore all the evidence and self-contradictions in order to accept it as truth.
Liberals are ignorant fascists who believe everything fascists believe but have been convinced they are not fascist because they aren’t personally involved in putting brown people in murder camps. Some liberals are ignorant comrades who have their heart in the right place but need to be lead to the water before they decide to drink and subsequently vomit out all the poisonous fascist ideas they have ingested all their lives.
That’s an interesting way to put it, “self-crypto-fascism.” I’m inclined to agree that there isn’t really a coherent ideology in liberalism. Much of the platitudes of it seem to be based in magical thinking, when they aren’t simply saying what the fascist says but putting it more nicely. Like the fascist is convinced that some people really are subhuman and deserve to be treated that way, but the liberal has convinced themself that calling the marginalized person a thing like “problematic” instead of subhuman is somehow escaping having the same views.
In essence, I think a lot of the delusion hides behind a belief that saying something in a nice way is the same as having a nice view. But it’s not and as much as I like diplomatic practice myself, I would say authentic diplomacy comes from a place of real respect for the other person/entity. And said respect doesn’t even have to mean liking them, it’s more about understanding what their struggles are and holding space for that. The problem for liberals in this regard being that they often don’t actually respect the person they’re speaking to or about. Their elitist beliefs get in the way of that. So they can say the lines like “I hear you”, but actually hearing the person, allowing it to get past what they believe, is difficult.
I’m tired and thinking it through as I type this out, but something like that.
i would like to do my own analysis when it’s not late as fuck, but how do socdems tie into this? tentatively, i want to say the ones who aren’t future comrades are mostly downwardly mobile young men whose aspirations are to get themselves a bigger slice of the imperial pie
I am not surprised that the Liberals have more Fascist traits than commonly belief. The Holocaust were an imitation of the “Indian Residential schools” and “federal reservations” in the USA while the Britain and France were worshipping and supporting Hitler’s conquest at the neglect for Stalin’s call for fight against Fascism. If Joseph Stalin had not made a political move to forcebly end the alliance that the Britian and Franch empires made with Adolf Hitler, then the Nazis would eventually made the European colonizers suffer from their colonial practices. Stalin receives the most slanders from the Liberals for ending the free riding, but his actions were the reason why Fascism did not advance too far.